12. How to Be a Person: Your Money's Worth

The Newsletter for Sunday March 10th, 2024

This week I went to the Comedy Bar here in Toronto and I did not get my money’s worth.

We went to see the 9:30 standup show called Point Break Comedy because we didn't have time to go to the 8 o'clock improv show “Nice Time” that has a lot of heavy hitters in it.

The first Comic got up and was the picture of a young stand-up comedian. Odd, bad with eye contact, lots of inappropriate humour. He told jokes. They weren't always great, but they were jokes. That's something that one would expect a standup show you're saying to yourself. Me too. That's what I expected. But I was to discover with the subsequent comedians, there were very few jokes to be had. Instead there was mostly something called crowd work.

Crowd work is when the comedian interviews audience members and then mines the interaction for laughs. Todd Barry is a master at it. My old friend Phil Hanley is really good at it.

Crowd work has become a contentious element in comedy because of how lazy it is. So many comedians rely on it these days. Crowd work is great in the hands of a pro. And when that pro has earned the privilege. You have to earn it.

The second comedian was in dirty clothes. Unwashed jeans, an unwashed baseball cap worn backwards atop an unwashed face. The hoodie he wore he had sweat through so thoroughly his pit stains were almost down to his elbows. He didn't have any jokes, but he did have crowd work. He asked Larry the lawyer in the front row, all about his life. It didn't seem like he had prepared any material for the evening. This is lazy. And when you have a paying audience this is contempt. For people, for comedy. He even mentioned there were only 12 of us, as though it were our fault.

Perhaps he doesn't realize how hard it is to get out of the house these days, to find a sitter these days, to buy tickets, to find parking and to find the energy to take a risk on a bunch of unknown comics.

The second comedian came out with a basketball and handed it to an audience member. There was no joke attached. Just a ball. And then he announced he too would be doing some crowd work. Terrific. This started off as the same interviewing of Larry the lawyer. As though he wasn’t aware of what brilliance his prior compatriot had just perpetrated mere minutes before. Like he was fucking around in the green room with a basketball perhaps.

And then when he moved on to me I said I wasn't interested. I said I was interested in jokes than in more crowd work. This did not go over well. This was not what he was hoping for.

I’m a terrible liar. I have no poker face. I am not to be trifled with by a man-child, half my age that thinks they are above comedy. That put no work in. That feels they are entitled to more.

I clearly rattled the young man and for that I am sorry. It was not my intention to go to a comedy club and speak to the comedians. If I wanted to interact with the performers, I would've saved that for the improv show that had ended an hour earlier. That I had wished I had gotten to in time. Little did I know that there would be so much shitty improv at a stand-up comedy show under the guise of working the crowd.

The third comedian whose name is Abhi Pamnani was charming, funny, with an infectious energy. He spent the whole time trying to gain my approval in spite of himself.

Contempt for the art form you are practicing. How confounding. How can you put in the reps? Contempt for the people that show up for you. How can you serve your audience when you revile them?

I hope I got to that young man in a way where, after he cools down and stops resenting me, he thinks, maybe that asshole has a point. Maybe I should start writing some jokes once in a while. Because as it stands I’m not getting my money’s worth.

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